Curtis Jewell's Perl stuff

There really IS more than one way to do it, even on Windows!

May. 17th, 2010

May. 17th, 2010

Well, on http://use.perl.org/~Alias/journal/40184, Alias described how we shrunk the Strawberry Perl .msi files by ordering which files went into the databases, and suggested an Archive::Tar::Optimize. Let's see if that's actually worth doing.

So in the case of the Perl source code, trying to optimize the .tar file by trying to group files with similar extensions together (as an attempt to optimize for similar content) doesn't do enough to worry about in the .xz case, and makes a file that compresses WORSE for .gz and .bz2.

And just as an aside, the .tar files are exactly the same size.

(speaking of which, .xz is obviously optimized for decompression. It took about 90 seconds to compress each file, while .bz2 and .gz take 15 seconds each.)

Of course, your mileage may vary, based on your own test data.

Should actually try with an extracted Strawberry Perl (in order to have more binary data) and see what happens.